Friday, May 23, 2014

1. I have a small backlog of beer
recommendations to make, to the point that I considered devoting the whole of
today's post to them. Instead, I'll kick off with my favorite of the
lot, New Holland's
Dragon's Milk, a bourbon barrel stout that the brewer
variously describes as, a "stout with roasty malt character intermingled with
deep vanilla tones, all dancing in an oak bath", elaborating that:

Dragon's milk is a 17th century term used to describe
the strong beer usually reserved for royalty. This strong ale was aged in oak
for over 120 days. The aging process extracts flavors from the wood, which
contribute to its complex character. Hints of bourbon flavor perfectly
compliment its roasted malts to produce a beer fit for a king. [minor edits]

The beer lives up to the above description. Accordingly, I found it to be the
perfect way to celebrate the revelation that a recent health scare -- which
prompted me to become a teetotaler for over a month as a precaution -- was a
false alarm.

2. Pumpkin ratted out Little Man for the
first time. Well, not quite, but I see that I have supplied her the
phrase and the idea, when my intention was merely to make a point of
acknowledging that I was wrong to blame my daughter for a small mess...

Mrs. Van Horn had given her some "Gatorator" in a Big Girl glass before
they all went to the den, so I could start getting dinner ready. Soon after, I
heard my wife react to a spill. "Why did you take her in there with that? We
have sippy cups for that," I said, racing in with paper towels.

"[Little Man] came over and grabbed it."

"Oh, okay. That was
[Little Man]'s fault. I'll get you some more, Pumpkin."

"That was
[Little Man]'s fault," Pumpkin chimed in.

3. An article describing its author's experiment with
replacing her usual soap-and-shapoo skin hygiene regimen with a new spray-on
bacterial preparation is interesting on many levels:

AOBiome does not market its product as an alternative to
conventional cleansers, but it notes that some regular users may find
themselves less reliant on soaps, moisturizers and deodorants after as little
as a month. [Spiros] Jamas, a quiet, serial entrepreneur with a doctorate in
biotechnology, incorporated N. eutropha into his hygiene routine years ago;
today he uses soap just twice a week. The chairman of the company's board
of directors, Jamie Heywood, lathers up once or twice a month and shampoos just
three times a year. The most extreme case is David Whitlock, the M.I.T.-trained
chemical engineer who invented AO+. He has not showered for the past 12 years.
He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his
skin's bacterial colony to do the rest. I met these men. I got close
enough to shake their hands, engage in casual conversation and note that they
in no way conveyed a sense of being "unclean" in either the visual
or olfactory sense. [minor edits]

The author also notes that her acne cleared up, remarking, "How funny it would
be if adding bacteria were the answer all along." This early attempt to
apply what is being learned about therole of naturally-occurring
bacteria (the "microbiome", aka, "the second
genome") in human health is interesting as much for what remains unknown
as what is being learned.

Not having any major problems I can
attribute to my own current routine, not wanting greasy hair, and sure that
there is more to this picture, I am much more of an interested spectator than a
potential customer.

4.
Reprogramming the immune system to fight cancerlooks promising for patients,
not to mention lucrative for pharmaceutical firms:

Everything changed for Novartis with a patient named Douglas Olson,
then 64, who had been diagnosed 14 years before with chronic lymphocytic
leukemia. His disease no longer responded to chemo, and he had two years to
live without a risky bone marrow transplant. Then he got the cell treatment
that Novartis would soon buy. He spiked a fever of 103 and had to be
hospitalized because his kidneys were failing. His kidneys made it, but the
cancer didn't. Five pounds of cancer cells disappeared from his blood and
bone marrow. "I had a complete mind shift. All of a sudden you
don't have this thing sitting there waiting to kill you." He bought
a boat and, four years later, still cancer free, scheduled an interview with
Forbes around chainsawing trees on his Pennsylvania property. [minor edits]

Believe it or not, the sub-plot concerning how the pharmaceutical giant,
Novartis, is remaking itself to focus on fighting cancer will vie with that of the breakthrough for your
attention.